Error Sensitivity Analysis of DMB Transport Streams

In this paper, we examine the sensitivity of the digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) MPEG-2 transport stream (TS) format to transmission errors. To find the sensitivity of different parts of TS packets to transmission errors, each TS packet is divided into four cells, i.e., the first three cells comprising 48 bytes each and the last cell is of 44 bytes length. Bit errors are then introduced into these different parts of the TS packets. The sensitivity of DMB videos to transmission errors and their locations is assessed in terms of the following measures: 1) Number of decoder crashes; 2) Number of decodable videos; 3) Total number of decodable frames; and 4) Objective perceptual video quality of the decoded videos. The structural similarity index and visual information fidelity criterion are used as objective perceptual quality metrics. Simulations are performed on seven different DMB videos using various bit error rates. The results show that the first cell of the TS packets is highly sensitive to bit errors compared to the subsequent three cells, both in terms of spatial and temporal video quality. Further, the sensitivity decreases from Cell 1 to Cell 4 of a DMB TS packet. The error sensitivity analysis reported in this paper may guide the development of more reliable transmission systems for future DMB systems and services. Specifically, the insights gained from this study may support designing better error control schemes that take the sensitivity of different parts of DMB TS packets into consideration.